How time-loop games offer escape from a world that is running out of time

Timeloop games, in which players try to find their way out of a cycling series of events, are enjoying something of a renaissance. It's as if the industry were caught in a Groundhog Day scenario devoted to the creation of Groundhog Days. Last week's E3 announcements alone gave us Luis Antonio's 12 Minutes, in which players endlessly relive their deaths at the hands of a mysterious housebreaker, and Arkane's Deathloop, in which two assassins vie for dominance of one and the same day on a swishly late-70s island base.

These follow hard on the heels of Mobius Digital's The Outer Wilds, possibly my game of the year, whose clockwork merry-go-round of a solar system is never further than 20 minutes from self-combustion. Last summer saw the release of All Walls Must Fall, a game about scouring the discos of 80s Berlin for a nuclear bomb, and Minit, which gives you 60 seconds to lift a curse that strips those seconds away. The summer before there was The Sexy Brutale, a gory masquerade in which every death has its counterpoint in a frightfully memorable score.

How to account for the popularity of this premise? Well, one key draw may be that timeloop games are relatively resource-efficient. They allow developers of modest means to squeeze many hours of play from a single set of props and areas, like a whole colony of rabbits from a magician's hat. A second explanation is that timeloops are great fun to peg out if, like the creators of The Sexy Brutale, you're the kind of designer who gleans copiously from film or theatre. They offer space for baroque dramatic flourishes or Shyamalan-esque narrative trickshots that would be ignored, or spoiled, in a game where time waits on the player. There's also the question of nostalgia, perhaps: among the earliest practitioners of the form is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, which winds and rewinds a planetary collision. But beyond all that, and at the risk of stuffing words into the mouths of the developers concerned, I think timeloop games speak to a diffuse and distinctly 21st century anxiety about the concept of time at large. To illustrate this, let's take a fresh look at one of the finest time-loop games ever made.

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